Smalltalk on AP4R

After playing around with AP4R, the new kid on the asynchronous Ruby block, for a little while, I held a small presentation at last week’s meeting of the Ruby User Group Berlin. While it is more of an introduction than a field report I put up the slides as PDF anyway.

Random Friday Links

• WestCIV, makers of the fabulous Style Master CSS Editor, introduced a neat tool called XRAY to inspect any website in your browser without any extra tools. While I’m perfectly aware that FireBug can do that too, let me just state that I don’t use Firefox as my main browser. XRAY might come in pretty handy, if you don’t have the tools you normally use, at hand.
• Amy Newell sums up 10 things you should know about method_missing rather nicely.
• Edge Rails adds support for partial layouts. DRY up that partial code, I say.
• Happy Third Anniversary, Rails. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that you brought so much joy and passion back into our complexity- and heavyweight-infested lives.
• Atlassian acquires Cenqua. It’s about time that two Sydney-based companies building most excellent tools finally go hand in hand.

10 Things I’ve been Doing Lately

1. Integrating Ferret, a very nice search engine for Ruby, in a project with acts_as_ferret.
2. Learning ten finger typing.
3. Writing an article about one of my favorite clothing labels, New Zealand based Huffer, for the magazine of two friends.
4. Been hiking though snowy mountains in Norway on my summer holiday.
5. Reading “RESTful Web Services” by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. A highly recommended book on REST which I’m starting to like.
6. Doing my first real-life project with the features of Java 5. That might sound a little ridiculous, but the clients using Java I worked for over the last year all used Java 1.4, mainly for political reasons or restrictions of the application server environment (WebLogic 8.2 is a no-go with Java 5).
7. Finding more and more joy in photography, and at the same time starting to really like Lightroom.
8. Playing with AP4R, an asynchronous job processor for Ruby and Rails. It looks like a very nice and more reliable way to do background tasks than BackgrounDRb. The latter now has a new maintainer by the way. Maybe that will bring the mostly stalled development back up to par.
9. Working in my office. Something I really enjoy. Having a decent and quiet place to work in is important for a freelancer.
10. Looking for a new mobile. In case you’re wondering the iPhone doesn’t appeal to me.

Learning Ten Finger Typing

For ten years now, I’ve been rather successful with my own typing style, using mostly my index fingers. I am pretty fast this way, but over the last months this lead to more and more pain in my wrists and my knuckles which can be rather unpleasant, especially when you type for a living. Learning to use all ten fingers for typing has been on my list for quite a while now, so now I finally got over myself and started learning it.

The Freelancer Survey on FreelanceSwitch

My favorite freelancing blog FreelanceSwitch has announced their 2007 Global Freelancer Survey. Give them some minutes of your time and help get together helpful information for all the freelancers out there.